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Featured in Development

As part of our core values of sharing knowledge, the InfoQ editors were keen to capture and share our book and article recommendations for 2018, so that others can benefit from this too. In this second part we are sharing the final batch of recommendations

Featured in Architecture & Design

Tanya Reilly discusses her research into how the fire code evolved in New York and draws on some of the parallels she sees in software. Along the way, she discusses what it means to be an SRE, what effective aspects of the role might look like, and her opinions on what we as an industry should be doing to prevent disasters.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Mik Kersten has published a book, Project to Product, in which he describes a framework for delivering products in the age of software. Drawing on research and experience with many organisations across a wide range of industries, he presents the Flow Framework™ as a way for organisations to adapt their product delivery to the speed of the market.

Featured in DevOps

The fact that machine learning development focuses on hyperparameter tuning and data pipelines does not mean that we need to reinvent the wheel or look for a completely new way. According to Thiago de Faria, DevOps lays a strong foundation: culture change to support experimentation, continuous evaluation, sharing, abstraction layers, observability, and working in products and services.

News

Dr. Sallyann Freudenberg talked about neuro-diversity in the work place at QCon London. Programming is a complex creative task, and Freudenberg explored a number of the techniques that programmers in general use to help them achieve it.

Randy Shoup shared his experiences to the QCon London audience in scaling services at Google and eBay, giving advice on building and operating services. A successful services strategy requires end-to-end service ownership, decentralized decision-making and standardization efforts focused on protocols of communications and supporting infrastructure.

Matt Ranney, Chief Systems Architect at Uber, gave an overview of their dispatch system, responsible for matching Uber's drivers and riders. Ranney explained the driving forces that led to a rewrite of this system. He described the architectural principles that underpin it, several of the algorithms implemented and why Uber decided to design and implement their own RPC protocol.

At QCon London 2015 Phil Calcado shared lessons learnt from SoundCloud’s move from a monolithic to microservices architecture, and stated that the core requirements for building a microservice platform include developing capabilities for rapid provisioning, basic monitoring and rapid application deployment.

Luke Marsden stated at QCon London 2015, that although Docker containers provide a very useful deployment mechanism for development and test, the absence of host mobility for containers with state may provide problems in production deployments. The open source Flocker tool provides a mechanism to overcome this by allowing stateful containers to be moved between hosts.

It’s not unusual in financial service systems to have problems that requires significant vertical, as opposed to horizontal, scaling. During his talk at QCon London Peter Lawrey described the particular problems that occur when you scale a Java application beyond 32GB.

The goal of software is to sustainably minimize lead time to positive business impact, everything else is detail, Dan North claimed in a presentation at the QCon London conference describing ways of reasoning about code and how this leads him into an architecture style that may fit microservices.

Larry Maccherone, a Data Scientist at Tasktop Technologies, gave a talk at QCon London 2015 regarding the importance of metrics usage and how they should influence important decisions in the organizations.

At QCon London 2015, Dave Farley proposed that although the state of software development has been suboptimal in the past, studies are revealing that the implementation of continuous delivery leads to considerable improvement. Farley stated that continuous delivery changes the economies of software development, and provides more rapid business idea validation and reduced defect rates.

Anna Shipman, technical architect at UK's Government Digital Service (GDS), revealed to the QCon London attendees how DevOps permeates their culture. GDS aims to lead the digital transformation of UK's government, "mak[ing] digital services and information simpler, clearer and faster". Its most well known site is GOV.UK, which provides government information and services.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) made us think about breaking up monolithic systems into individual services but also encouraged building producer driven monster services with centralised control. With microservices we are going back to the underlying notions of why SOA made sense, Rebecca Parsons claimed in a presentation at the QCon London conference.

At QCon London 2015, Colin Garlick presented “An Architect’s World View”, which provided a set of values, principles and practices to act as guidance for a software architect. The core values included people, the big picture, teamwork and integrity. Garlick proposed that these values are essentially characteristics that can be prioritised in order to work as a successful software architect.

Going into its 9th year, QCon London is UK's premier event designed exclusively for senior enterprise software development professionals: Technical Team Leads, Architects, Software Engineers, and Project Managers. If you've thought of attending, there is still a chance to go to one of the best conferences for our craft. QCon is now less than 2 weeks away! Why still register now?

John Wilkes, ​Principal Software Engineer at Google and Roy Rapoport, Manager of Insight Engineering at Netflix have been confirmed to keynote at the 9th annual QCon London (Mar 2-6, 2015). All four keynotes, 65/100 speakers, and 13 tutorials are now confirmed, including 19 conference tracks. Register before Jan 26 and save £290.